All these teams are led by a team leader and the overall structure is supervised and coordinated by a call center manager.
Both the team leader and the call center manager seem to have a dual responsibility: first, they ensure that the instructions from the upper management and the directions of activity are clearly communicated to the employees at the call center, thus ensuring the coordination with the rest of the organization. Second, they supervise and control, ensuring that the respective instructions are properly respected by the employees at the call center.
Procedures make up for another important component of the social system at the call center. The procedures are part of every activity to which the call center relates. For example, the recruitment process is regulated by a set of procedures, making up the necessary filter that ensure that only the best seven out of one hundred applicants are hired in the end. The procedures in the recruitment process include the application pack, the application form, the telephone interview, role playing and a formal interview.
Training involves a separate set of procedures that focus on ensuring that communication aspects are improved for the employees. This includes the assimilation of the core standards of behavior, communication skills and ways in which to use the technology available in the workplace. Finally, additional procedures are incorporated in the work process itself. One example here is the way that the timeframe of a call is divided into three approximate periods of time to describe the discussion itself, post-call activities (namely entering the information in the technical system) and lag time after the previous two activities and before a new call. While this is not necessarily a fixed procedure, it has been tacitly understood and implemented, especially since these timeframes are controlled electronically and monitored by management.
This last paragraph introduces the idea of control over the call center socio-technical system, since it was a good example of how management also tacitly...
First of all, technical control is used by management and the previous paragraph has shown how this is done to monitor and evaluate the work that an individual has performed. Control is enforced also through call distribution systems, which direct calls to the CSRs that can take these.
Bureaucratic control refers to institutionalizing standards and norms, as well as the processes that ensure that those standards are enforced. In this particular case, the call center has implemented specific criteria that can be used both by employees and by supervisors to evaluate work. The bureaucratic control is also reflected in some of the elements of the social system, notably the rules and regulations that are implemented in the call center.
Structural control is the result of a combination of the technical and bureaucratic control. Basically, the social system and the technological system are put together in terms of structural control. As such, some of the components of the technical system can be used to implement some of the norms and procedures that bureaucratic control has established and that management aims to implement.
As a final conclusion to the description of the socio-technical system at the call center, it is clear that the problem with the 'socio' is that, contrary to the technical part, the socio involves a more complicated control and feedback mechanism, as well as more developed procedures to ensure that the human resources perform most efficiently. While the technological components are much easier to predict, the components of the social system can ever be predicted.
Bibliography
1. Callaghan, G. (2001) Socio-Technical Systems And Call Centres: A Case Study Investigation. ESRC End of Award Report. R000222799. Open University. Retrieved October 11, 2010, from http://www.esds.ac.uk/doc/4606%5Cmrdoc%5Cpdf%5Cq4606uab.pdf
2. Why a Socio-Technical System? On the Internet at http://computingcases.org/general_tools/sia/socio_tech_system.html. Retrieved on October 11, 2010
